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2 Responses

There's no single best answer here. Generally speaking, by consolidating the sub-domain into the root, each link pointing to the blog carries slightly more weight because it's feeding the blog AND the main site in a more direct manner. Traffic and organic clicks through to the blog also pass weight more cleanly (and thus with more strength) to the blog and main site as well.

A key factor however, is "What is the topical intent of the main site?" Is the main site an eCommerce site? The topical intent in this case is transactional. If that's the case, and since the blog's topical intent is informational, you may not see as much gain through consolidation compared to a situation where the main site's topical intent is also informational.

Unfortunately, there's no specific guarantee one way or the other in regard to the amount of impact merging transactional and informational content would have, given there are so many other factors weighed in SEO these days.

If you do migrate, be sure you get as close to 100% parity with implementing 301 redirects from the old blog URLs to the new blog URLs. That would be crucial. If the blog currently has an extremely high volume of organic traffic, and if the main site is transactional, I'd recommend leaving things as they are. If, however, the blog only has limited organic traffic, I'd recommend merging, and doing a full media push (press release, social drive, etc.) to let the world know, and immediately signal to the search engines that this change is a big deal, so as to ensure the most likelihood that any minor bleed-off from 301s is mitigated.

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